I don’t know if it’s a thing, but I’m calling it my fan journey: the journey that I’ve taken as a fan.
And I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve been incredibly lucky in my fan journey because the kind of stories and rep I’ve seen in my journey gave a gender-nonconforming kiddo like me solace.
When I was little, my dad had this idea that he’d train me to recognise composers based on a little snippet of a classical piece, kind of like a party trick you could never use at an adult-only cocktail party.
My first musical love was classical music, Mozart, Chopin and Beethoven among my favourites. Beethoven was a composer who eventually went completely deaf.
Modern analysis has suggested it may have been due to large amounts of lead and other health issues. Whatever the reason was, he started losing his hearing in his mid-20s and went completely deaf sometime in his early forties.
From there it seemed like a natural progression to get into Queen.
We used to listen to Queen, Dire Straits and the like on the summer road trips as we’d drive to visit relatives in other cities.
And having loved Queen, it was no surprise I loved The Rocky Horror Picture Show the first time I saw it.
Then when I was six, my mum did a summer at a uni in Torremolinos in Spain. I didn’t speak Spanish and was sent off every day to a babysitter whose family all spoke nothing but Spanish.
I was quite lost and spent a lot of time watching TV as a shy, confused kid. However, that did lead me to discover MTV which showed me Keep It In The Closet, and so began my Michael Jackson obsession.
Dangerous is still my favourite album and there’s nothing like the jazzy choreography of Bad (yes, this absolutely influenced me eventually getting a degree in dance). Fast on the heels of that is Thriller but it did come two years before I was born so it was a little before my time.
I think there was something about keeping things to yourself that spoke to me as an autistic, gender-nonconforming kid in the middle of a divorce, and even though I remember being aware of the song/video having very sexual energy, it touched on something deeper for me because it felt like it was more about identity.
Not to mention, that the music video for Remember The Time spoke to the Egyptology nerd in me like nothing else. I learned the dances, I had the VHSs, knew all the songs by heart, Michael Jackson was the first superfan thing I ever did. Because there was something about him that showed a different side to masculinity that spoke to the creativity in me, and showed me an understanding of art that I didn’t get from anyone around me.
At an age where I desperately wanted to be a boy, his music videos were a conduit for me to see myself in them. And I see the influence Michael Jackson’s work had on me mirrored in others, like Christine and the Queens (that influence is very evident in the video for Christine).
Then this band called Nirvana came almost out of nowhere and displaced the King of Pop in the charts and things started to change, eventually leading me to to the Foo Fighters. I wasn’t a huge Nirvana fan, but every kid around me was, and we were collectively obsessed with Smells Like Teen Spirit.
I did become a huge Foo Fighters fan because they seemed like a 90s update to Queen with the way they embraced the performance.
When Take That came out of Manchester, the world tilted for me again. We had a secret Take That fan club with my bestie and her big sister, and we’d meet in their linen closet. We would take down all the linens from the shelves so that we could each squeeze to lie in a shelf and discuss how amazing Take That was.
Even though Relight My Fire is a cover of an older song, and is generally understood to be sung from a heterosexual perspective, with a male singer expressing his desire to reignite the fire in a female partner, the visual spin that Take That and Lulu put on it in 1993, gave it a whole new context.
It became like a queer anthem that was still straight passing for a generation that was figuring out how to be queer in a world where no one approved of being anything other than cis-het.
And they were amazing for a kid like me. When all other boy bands were so formulaic, Take That was not afraid to embrace a more flouncy flair. Their energy was so clearly rooted in the gay and drag community and they continued strongly in the tradition of Queen and The Rocky Horror Picture Show that they felt like home.
The Fool in the Farseer-trilogy was also the first canonically gender-nonconforming character that I found in a book, and that’s a whole conversation in and of itself – as is the homophobia that was rampant in the literary and fanfic communities when I was a teenager.
My mum also used to take me to the library, where I’d hoard comics.
Among my favourites were Lucky Luke, a cowboy who excels thanks to his on-hand resourcefulness and incredible gun prowess. He rides Jolly Jumper, “the smartest horse in the world” and is often accompanied by prison guard dog Rin Tin Can, “the stupidest dog in the universe”, a spoof of Rin Tin Tin.
Another one I used to get over and over again was of a female warrior, but I can’t for the life of me remember or find what the series was called. I just remember being so in awe of a woman that was the main character, who was tall and muscled, hauled around a large shield and sword and who did her own fighting (and that set me up nicely for becoming obsessed with Xena: Warrior Princess, amirite?).
Danish Valhall was also in my regular rotation, and reading it to my own kid now, two decades later, I see more clearly the commentary on the patriarchy that simply felt like a part of my own minority culture. The Books of Magic was another one of my favourite graphic novels, as was The Sandman.
I didn’t get indoctrinated into the standard superhero genre where everyone is beautiful but no one is horny until much later – and even then my favourite novels were the darker, less shinier ones, like Batman: The Long Halloween or comedic gold like Calvin and Hobbes.
These weren’t all of them, and I’m not trying to say that alternative representation in media has somehow been really excellent in the past.
But falling in love with things like I Love Lucy and then finding out how Lucille Ball was breaking down barriers as a woman in the industry was incredibly inspirational, and showed me that where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I guess all I can say is; I got lucky 🌟
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